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Monthly Archives: November 2018

One of four prizes awarded to the fifty-six members of the Kansas City police force in the annual target contest Thanksgiving was won by Mrs. Vinnie Callahan, with every shot in the circle and two dead center.

— The Kansas City Kansan, December 4, 1922

Everyone agreed that Vinnie Callahan was a great shot, though she rarely needed to use her gun in her job as the welfare officer of the police department in Kansas City, Kansas. Most of her workday was spent solving problems stemming in large part from poverty, poor judgment and anger management issues. It was a job that required compassion, common sense and patience. Her gun was a tool of last resort.

She was born Vinelia Good in 1881 in Junction City, Kansas, to Peter “Peachy” and Lulu Good. Her family had no money for her to attend college, so after she graduated from high school she worked as a typesetter for a local newspaper and later as a night telephone operator. In 1902 she married William Callahan, a college-educated veteran of the Spanish-American War. The following year their only child, a son named Byron, was born.

The Callahan family relocated to Kansas City, Kansas, and Vinnie stayed home to raise her boy. After Byron graduated from high school, in 1921, she was hired by the police department to be the “social welfare” officer. She threw herself into the job wholeheartedly.

Newspapers of the time are full of stories about Vinnie’s police work. The more mundane side of it involved helping people who were out of work find jobs so they could feed, clothe and house their families. “Untangling the domestic affairs of citizens” was how one newspaper described what she did. But really it involved much more than that.

When a woman was sent to prison for selling alcohol (prohibition was in force), Vinnie took care of her eight children who were left homeless and found them good temporary homes. She helped a depressed woman who spoke no English move out of a squalid shack and find a decent place to live after her husband murdered their two daughters. During the 1921 holidays she played “Mrs. Santa” at a local school that had mostly impoverished students. There she distributed gifts, toys and ice cream to the kids in good Mrs. Claus style.

Vinnie’s attitudes about parenting were far ahead of her time. She helped a young runaway girl, who’d been denounced by her family as “incorrigible,” communicate with her parents so that, instead of being relegated to life on the streets, she was able to return home. “It was the common case,” she told a reporter, “of the parents demanding obedience regardless of the child’s rights in the case. So many of them do not seem to realize children have social needs that should be studied and supplied.”

Helping people with day-to-day life challenges didn’t deter Vinnie from honing her target shooting skills. The police department held a yearly contest just before Thanksgiving for its officers. She was one of four police officers ranked as among the best shots in 1921 and 1922. In 1924 she was ranked the second best marksman out of 51 cops and detectives. The achievement warranted a news story and a photographer hired by United Newspictures of New York City took a picture of her for the story.

The contest winners were awarded turkeys for their Thanksgiving feasts. Vinnie was probably the only person to win a turkey and cook it too.

Most of her male colleagues were good sports about being beaten by a woman at a traditionally male-dominated skill. Only one man grumbled publicly, blaming his poor showing on the fact that he was left-handed.

Vinnie left her job with the police in the mid-1920s. Unfortunately there’s no way to know what prompted her to retire, however it may have been for health reasons. She died, age 47, on December 13, 1928, after “an illness of several months duration” according to her obituary.

Featured photo: Policewoman Vinnie M. Callahan, news photo taken December 3, 1924. Collection of the author.

Short skirts may or may not be a sign of modern depravity, but they registered as a sign of bad luck for Peggy Hudson and her husband, according to reports from Los Angeles. Peggy is now awaiting sentence on a charge of first degree robbery.

— Hayward Semi-Weekly Review (Hayward, California), May 15, 1928

Charles Anderson arrived home after a long day at his Los Angeles restaurant, The Red Onion, on the night of March 5, 1928. He pulled his car into the garage, got out of the vehicle and was unpleasantly surprised to discover a man and woman waiting in the shadows for him.

The woman thrust a gun into his ribs and told him to turn out the lights. Once they were extinguished the man ordered Charles onto the ground and tied him up with a piece of rope. Then the couple went through his pockets and robbed him of the day’s profits from the restaurant — $382 cash ($5,640 in 2018).

Before they left the man remarked to Charles, “Guess I’ll have to take your car too. You see I’m an ex-convict and I have to make a quick getaway. Don’t be afraid, though. I don’t want your car and I’ll leave it a couple blocks from here on Reno Street.” And with that puzzling comment, the pair got into his car and drove off into the night.

Charles freed himself and called the police. His car was nowhere to be found.

“I didn’t get a good look at her face, but I saw her legs, and I could pick them out any time,” he told the police. He claimed the legs he’d seen belonged to Nora Hudson, better known as Peggy. She was a woman he’d previously employed as a cashier at his restaurant. He also said he thought he recognized Peggy by her voice but he was less sure of that than he was about her legs. He didn’t know her male companion.

Changes in women’s hemlines in the 1920s meant a lot more leg showed than ever before and naturally men took notice. This careful, possibly even lecherous, observation of his female employee’s legs paid off for Charles. It took two months but the LAPD finally located 20-year-old Peggy by tracing her to her home address on Flower Street in downtown L.A. The police took Peggy and her husband, Willard Hudson, a musician, into custody and booked them on suspicion of robbery.

Was there something unusally memorable about Peggy’s legs? If so it’s not obvious in the news photo.

California State Archives

Willard’s incriminating comment about having a criminal record turned out to be true. He’d been incarcerated at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas.

A pair of slick criminals the Hudsons were not. With time to cool off they likely realized they’d been foolish to rob a man who knew Peggy. Then they compounded their mistake when Willard confessed his criminal background to their victim.

They pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery and each was sentenced to five years to life in prison. Willard served his sentence at Folsom Prison and Peggy was sent to San Quentin. She was paroled in August 1931 after she was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Peggy Hudson must go down in history as the only person ever captured and sent to prison after being identified by her legs.

Juanita McKamey, the 20-year-old modern Joan of Arc, who had visions of leading a conquering host of the Industrialists into their proposed new republic, was brought before Judge W.R. Guy of the Juvenile Court today. The bright-eyed maid was undaunted by the surroundings of the law and told the court she did not hear him tell her at her last visit to break connections with the I.W.W.’s.

— The Los Angeles Times, March 29, 1912

The year was 1912 and revolution was in the air. The right to free speech and the question of where one could exercise it was a burning issue in America. The California Free Speech League, a newly formed coalition of socialists, left-leaning labor groups, including the International Workers of the World (I.W.W.), single-taxers and church organizations was ready for action.

The group planned a mass parade for the evening of February 8th to test a recently passed city ordinance banning public speech in a seven-square block area of the city that was regarded as “congested” by city leaders, including an area known as “Soapbox Row.” Juanita McKamey, a local manicurist, was one of the parade’s organizers.

At 7:30 p.m. Juanita took up her position, along with several other leaders, at the front of the parade. Standing four abreast the marchers slowly moved forward. As they picked up speed they sang, waved banners and encouraged the three to five thousand onlookers to join them. The group was escorted by a contingent of more than 100 San Diego police officers and a police blockade waited for them at Sixth and E Streets. No one would be arrested as long as the parade kept moving.

When the marchers reached the blockade they moved through it towards Soapbox Row. Wood Hubbard, one of the leaders, tried to mount a soapbox that was hastily set up for the speakers. He was immediately pulled down and roughly arrested. Another female marcher tried next and she too was pulled down and arrested. Juanita was the third person to try to mount the box to speak and she too was forcibly taken into police custody.

The crowd responded to the rough treatment of the speakers by surging forward chanting “Free speech, show that you are Americans.” The police had to expend much of their energy on crowd control, but no one got to speak. The thirty-eight men and three women, including Juanita, who tried to mount the box were arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy.

Three days later Juanita, who’d been bailed out of jail, was arrested again after she spoke at another rally. This time she was charged with being “incorrigible.” In the photo on her police identification card she looks serious and eager to return to the fight. The officer who prepared the card wrote on it that she “was speaking on the corner of 5th and E sts whick is against the law.”

She was put on probation and ordered to drop her association with the I.W.W. She was sentenced to the local Detention Home (for juveniles). This was an odd choice since authorities were aware that, at age 20, she was not a juvenile.

Juanita didn’t intend to follow the court’s orders. Instead she planned to continue what she defined as her “calling” to work for freedom of speech. She organized an escape from a window of the detention facility using a rope she’d fashioned from blankets. The plan was uncovered before she had a chance to put it into action and she was transferred to the city jail to await trial with the others.

The city and county jails overflowed with people arrested for violating the ordinance. Conditions at the jail were unsanitary and some of the inmates got sick. There was mounting opposition to the free speech movement among many locals. When a group of inmates was transferred to a jail in another county, some local vigilantes intercepted the trucks the prisoners were riding in and beat them up.

By late February Juanita was out on bail and agitating for free speech on the streets again. In March she was part of a group of more than 300 protestors hosed by police in front of the City Jail with four hundred pound-pressure fire hoses while jail inmates serenaded the demonstrators by singing “The Marseillaise.”

In the wake of public protest meetings and vigilante violence the city came up with a new ordinance, referred to as the “move-on law.” The new law expanded the area where public speech was prohibited and sanctioned the arrest of anyone who “shall seem likely to obstruct and impede” passage along a city street. The new law proved to be a diaster because if someone even looked like they might make a speech they could be arrested.

The I.W.W. demanded a state investigation of the protest and the police response to it. The investigation discovered no mistreatment of the prisoners. Even the hosing of protesters by police was deemed not to have resulted in any serious consequences. The investigation also found no acts of violence among the protesters.

Juanita attended the state investigation hearings in late April 1912. This was the last time her name came up in protest-related news. By the end of May the I.W.W announced their departure from the San Diego campaign. In mid-June, after a smallpox epidemic broke out in the jail, the last 15 free speech prisoners pleaded guilty, paid fines and were released. The revolution was over.

Who was the young woman the newspapers described as a “modern Joan of Arc?”

Despite her Hispanic first name, Juanita was the Caucasian daughter of Andrew McKamey of Ohio and Sofronia Catherine Clarkford of Virginia. The McKamey’s started their married life in Ohio, and then moved to San Diego, where Juanita was born in 1891. In an atypical move, the family went back east in the late 1890s. Andrew made a living farming in Georgia. They returned to San Diego by 1905 and Andrew found work as a carpenter.

California State Archives

After the free speech fight in San Diego ended Juanita continued to live an unconventional life. She had a son, born in 1914, and a daughter, born in 1918. It appears that she was unmarried when her children were born. However she did eventually marry a Pennsylvania man named Harry H. Kizer.

She may have met Harry during the free speech protests when he was also arrested. However he wasn’t the father of her children, because in 1913 Harry did a 3.5 year stint in Folsom State Prison for grand larceny. By 1930, though they still lived under one roof, Juanita and Harry were divorced.

Juanita worked in real estate and was the owner of a “Tia Juana” beer garden. She was a member of the socialist party until at least 1928. She lived for 60 years in Chula Vista, a city south of San Diego, near the border with Mexico. In 1975 she died in Chula Vista and her ashes were scattered at sea.

Further reading: There’s a lot more to know about the San Diego Free Speech Fight of 1912. Click here for an in-depth, eight part article.